July 4th and the Black Church

In 2006, my life went in an unexpected direction due to a Wednesday night Bible study at Pleasant Hill Baptist that introduced me to the Black Church. I was studying with the same group on the notorious night of June 17, 2015. That evening, I returned home late, and my wife lacked the heart to tell me about the Charleston shooting. She knew it had been a long day, and I needed sleep. It was the next day that I learned of the tragedy and it has been hard to think of anything else ever since.

Mother Emmanuel AME

Wednesday night African-American Bible studies act as the bookends of when my life’s plans were interrupted and learning the names of Dylann Roof and Clementa Pinckney. Between the bookends are the stories of how the folks of Pleasant Hill became family. Part of the story is how Deloris Williams on the fourth row prayed for a wife for me and got done more in two months than I had in a lifetime. Later in the story, the church prayed for and accepted our children as their children. I was welcomed to participate in Pleasant Hill funerals and into hospital rooms as our people fought for their lives. Tragedy is never far away, and I knew that when tragedy knocked on my door I would not be alone. Nothing transforms us more than our family.

Listening to and participating in the stories arising out of Houston’s 5th Ward reshaped the lens through which I saw my story, the story of my faith and my country. Like other churches, on the week of July 4th, we worship with our country on our mind. This week acts as my 10th such celebration. Worshiping at a Black Church is an experience every Christian in America needs to experience at least once regardless of color or denomination. The Black Church simply has a fuller depth perception concerning the day’s significance than any other institution in our nation. It is a day with neither naïveté nor nihilism nor cynicism. It is a day for truth-filled lament. It is a day to rejoice. It is a day to confess sins present and past. It is a day to marvel how God’s grace has brought us this far. July 4th is a day that quickens the longing for Revelation’s no mores – no more hunger, no more thirst, no more tears …

The inconvenient truths of our nation’s broken moral compass is ever-present in the worship of the Black Church. It is no secret that there was more to our founding fathers than their virtues; that slavery and oppression were more than a blemish in our nation’s history; that slavery acted as much as an organizing principle in our nation as liberty and justice for all; that, as Faulkner said: “The past is not dead. In fact it is not even past.” The Black Church witnesses the precious lives of our young often unraveling in the struggle to grind out a life of dignity; witnesses as a broken education system finds a tragic harmony with a broken justice system, which finds a tragic harmony with a broken economic system; witnesses the beat of generational poverty go on like a broken record unchecked and largely unchallenged in the richest nation in history.

In the Black Church, July 4th celebrations recognize the tragedies at the heart of the American experiment with democracy and yet she celebrates still. She celebrates that as a nation, we traveled a long way from our founding fathers and forbears’ moral imagination regarding race, a long way in rectifying their vices and living into their virtues. And though many who worship in Black Churches were born without the hope of voting, though many remember the days when their interactions with whites were thoroughly formed by the fear of lynching, those same folk have become unlikely witnesses that freedom and justice need not be segregated, that change can happen like a strike of lightning. Celebration happens because every gift of this nation is something that should be cherished, because in this land God’s amazing grace created a people of faith marked by amazing gratitude.

On this July 4th, in the wake of losing Clementa Pickney, and other members from “Mother Emmanuel,” our country is in unique need of healing. As we celebrate today, we should remember the Mayflower and the many ships that set sail for a land of freedom and opportunity. Such ships are a part of our history. But we should pause to remember the ships we desire to forget, ones that brought over those who would never know freedom but who are as much of our story as any patriot. Our love of our country need not be blind, and our history need not be whitewashed. I am coming to believe that naïveté and cynicism are but different sides of a token of a self-righteous hard-hardheartedness that fights against the healing our nation needs. There is, I believe, another way to be patriotic, a way that allows July 4th to act as much as a call to be vulnerable as it is to be proud, a call that quickens our thirst for a more perfect union by dealing truthfully with our sins and knowing that in some way we play a role in bringing things on earth into a closer harmony with the ways of heaven.

I cannot get into Dylann Roof’s mind. I do not know what made him put his hatred into action, but what has become clear to me since the tragedy of Trayvon Martin is that Dylan is one of us. Dylan is thoroughly American and embodies something tragic about our history, culture and society. That he is mentally ill is not in question. The question is, Can we pause long enough, be vulnerable enough, be truthful and courageous enough to recognize how deeply our sickness and wounds run. Can we face the truths about the American soul that Dylan tragically embodies?

This July 4th provides no answers to the tragedy of Charleston, but it does provide the opportunity to put into practice the vulnerability that Dylan rejected. Dylan says that the kindness of Mother Emmanuel made him reconsider his plans. Perhaps the tragedy in Charleston should prompt in us the readiness to reconsider our celebrations, to pause in both gratitude and repentance in a nation that has come so far and still has as far to go in the democratic journey of maturing into a country that embodies the conviction that all are created equal. What was most tragic about Charleston was that Dylan’s chosen location for his crime scene was the exact location with potential to heal his soul.

May we have the courage not to move on from Mother Emmanuel. May we have the courage to embrace the vulnerability Dylann rejected.